robably, the first five resolutions as
offered by Henry in the committee, but "passed," as he himself
afterward wrote, "by a very small majority, perhaps of one or two
only."

Upon this final discomfiture of the old leaders, one of their number,
Peyton Randolph, swept angrily out of the house, and brushing past
young Thomas Jefferson, who was standing in the door of the lobby, he
swore, with a great oath, that he "would have given five hundred
guineas for a single vote."[70] On the afternoon of that day, Patrick
Henry, knowing that the session was practically ended, and that his
own work in it was done, started for his home. He was seen "passing
along Duke of Gloucester Street, ... wearing buckskin breeches, his
saddle bags on his arm, leading a lean horse, and chatting with Paul
Carrington, who walked by his side."[71]

That was on the 30th of May. The next morning, the terrible Patrick
being at last quite out of the way, those veteran lawyers and
politicians of the House, who had found this young protagonist alone
too much for them all put together, made bold to undo the worst part
of the work he had done the day before; they expunged the fifth
resolution. In that mutilated form, without the preamble, and with the
last three of the original resolutions omitted, the first four then
remained on the journal of the House as the final expression of its
official opinion. Meantime, on the wings of the wind, and on the eager
tongues of men, had been borne, past recall, far northward and far
southward, the fiery unchastised words of nearly the entire series, to
kindle in all the colonies a great flame of dauntless purpose;[72]
while Patrick himself, perhaps then only half conscious of the fateful
work he had just been doing, travelled homeward along the dusty
highway, at once the jolliest, the most popular, and the least
pretentious man in all Virginia, certainly its greatest orator,
possibly even its greatest statesman.

FOOTNOTES:

[57] Wirt, 24.

[58] Meade, _Old Families and Churches of Va._ i. 220.

[59] Maury, _Mem. of a Huguenot Fam._ 423.

[60] Wirt, 39-41.

[61] Mem. by Jefferson, in _Hist. Mag._ for 1867, 91.

[62] Jefferson's _Works_, vi. 365.

[63] Mem. by Jefferson, in _Hist. Mag._ for 1867, 91.

[64] These documents are given in full in the Appendix to Wirt's _Life
of Henry_, as Note A.

[65] _Jour. Va. House of Burgesses._

[66] Of this famous series of resolutions, the first five are here
g